<p><b>No synthetic chemical
system can produce complex oligomers with fidelities comparable to biological
systems. To bridge this gap, chemists must be able to </b><b>characterise</b><b> synthetic
oligomers. Currently there are no tools for identifying synthetic oligomers with
sequence resolution. Herein, we present a system that allows us to do omics-level
sequencing for synthetic oligomers and use this to explore unconstrained
complex mixtures. The system, Oligomer-Soup-Sequencing (OLIGOSS), can sequence
individual oligomers in heterogeneous and polydisperse mixtures from tandem
mass spectrometry (MS/MS) data. Unlike existing software, OLIGOSS can sequence
oligomers with different backbone chemistries. Using an input file format,
OLIG, that formalizes the set of abstract properties, any MS/MS fragmentation
pathway can be defined. This has been demonstrated on four model systems of
linear oligomers. OLIGOSS can screen large sequence spaces, enabling reliable
sequencing of synthetic oligomeric mixtures, with false discovery rates (FDRs) of
0-1.1%, providing sequence resolution comparable to bioinformatic tools.</b></p>
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